AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits(techcrunch.com) |
AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits(techcrunch.com) |
The idea was to start out with some software similar to this. Something visually impressive to keep it interesting for beginners, but technically sound to make it useful to those who know what they're doing. It would be open source, internet connected, easily accessible and most importantly simple to create and share ideas.
From there, let people make some interesting things for school, work, play, whatever, ideally sharing said creations and try to raise a community around the tools and creations.
The next stage would be to add a 3D rendering component which would allow people to create "machines" that could be run by their virtual electronics. Something like virtual fabrication. The ideal being to grow those interfaces and try to lead the community towards building virtual robots (that are technically feasible).
The eventual goal would be to build a virtual world on top of all of the above tools. Something like MechWarrior, but with engineers and industrial designers building virtual mechs from the smallest components to the large mechanical fabrication and then getting into all out war against one-another, adding to the mix less technical players to partake in the human elements of combat (generals, soldiers, medics, scavengers for destroyed mechs, etc).
Probably ridiculous, and if all went well I assume it would take years of work and planning, but it seemed like a fun idea to ponder.
It strikes me as pretty hard to satisfy both extremes. Don't even have to go to extremes. Forget exotic microwave work an just try to have the same software and user interface model both a stereotypical ham radio dude 20M dipole and simultaneously be usable for a kids arduino LED blinker and make a simple flashlight.
I would claim that minecraft redstone is a local maxima and you'd do best to try and extend/mod it. Someone out there probably already has (or should have) a mod to add basic logic gates in redstone, rather than simple plungers which already exist, how about simple robot arm joints in minecraft?
Not just for kids anymore.
I imagine it would be really annoying for beginners to build an IR receiver (or whatever) with the software, have it working perfectly, then try to build it on a real breadboard only to spend hours frustratingly trying to figure out why the circuit is oscillating.
What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to avoid if you have spent any time in a kitchen.
I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino is the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics. The danger is miniscule, and whatever danger that is there, is part of the learning process. You need this as much as you need a rice-cooker simulator.
With autodesk prices, i can probably buy enough caps and pay someone to solder for me.
And I recently was impressed to learn that they offer free licenses for most of their professional software (including Autocad) to school teachers, university faculty, and degree seeking students.
Qualifications: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=12311...
So yeah, the Autodesk news was kinda depressing, but really, that just means I'm going to focus more on the teaching end and in adding my own personal style to it through quirky graphical elements that harken back to the 8-bit era of yore. Autodesk can't sell a product with soul.
You can check it out if you want. Just to warn you though, my html abilities are a work-in-progress, so don't be surprised if you see some awful mistakes in there, or if it renders kinda funny if you have a small screen.
www.bighugebreadboard.com
I actually created it to teach myself electronics, so the biggest hurdle has been learning how various components work, and then adding them to the sim. Also, prior to this, my javascript knowledge was basically acquired through Codecademy.
I'm also putting some of the code on a Github repo, as in I plan to make it open-source. Alas, before I did that I cleaned up some prior amateur's mistakes without thinking of the bugs I would be opening up. I should have them fixed by tomorrow morning.
It took me 3 months from buying my first Arduino to using an ultrasonic distance sensor to control an RC car motor. http://gilgamech.blogspot.com
Unless there are some tie-ins with their other 123D software to, say, automatically create a hardware enclosure from a schematic.
That has long been my Achille's heel - I can EAGLE a pcb pretty easily, but woodworking / 3d interlocking Ponoko designs elude me.
What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).
I design electronics for a living, and I use LTspice all the time for power supply and analog circuit simulations.
The trailing capacitor just had a large value invisible resistor attaching it to your circuit somewhere :)
Professional circuit/PCB designers already know roughly what the issues are going to be and can order of magnitude approximate well enough to know if its worth fully modeling or not. For novices, just understanding what the parasitics are is hard enough, much less adding them to a circuit that is often already fairly complicated for them. Most lower frequency stuff that novices will be building should not have an issue with parasitics, but pushin breadboards are just awful and the most common hobbyist op amps have plenty high enough gain-bandwidth-products to bring them into play.
[1] Like all cheapskates, I use LTSpice.
WARNING: The first time I accidentally forgot to put a resistor in front of an LED and sent 50mA to one which was rated at 20mA, I expected it to fizzle and cut out like a regular incandescent light bulb does in my house.
When it literally exploded and the plastic covering went flying through the room, I was very very glad it didn't hit me in the eye, or I'd probably have done some fairly serious damage.
you learn to double check your circuits first then :)
An Arduino Uno costs about 25USD. Blowing up a few of those, or other components gets pricy. This service lowers the price of entry to almost zero, which is a pretty big deal for people with low disposable income or limited access to the hardware.
I like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi very much, but they are not the pioneers of this idea.
There have been a whole bunch of electronic prototyping systems aimed at hobbyists in the decade before Arduino and Raspberry Pi hit it big.
Just to name a few: Parallax Basic Stamp, the Micromint PicStic and Domino, X-10, MIT Media Lab's Programmable Bricks, Gumstix, Phidgets, Teensy USB Development Board, littleBits, LEGO Mindstorms, Bug Labs.
I was cheering for several of the above, and they met with various degrees of success. It seemed obvious to me that they should become enormously popular, as big as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, but they didn't. There were probably dozens more that folded up and disappeared.
What I'm trying to say is that it took a lot of iterations of design, business model, functionality, and being at the right time before a couple companies found just the right formula to make it really big.
How long should it take to make a high-power (3A+ @ 3V, buck-boost IC) LED driver, very approximately?
I must say I'm not sure how to feel watching the maker and hacker culture I love so much having its open heart slowly ripped out.
MakerBot themselves base their designs heavily on both the open hardware RepRap and open designs by other commercial manufacturers, and their head honch Bre Pettis was a big proponent of open hardware and maker culture - even publicly humiliating newbies to the community on his blog for failing to the files associated with their designs, insinuating that they were somehow undermining the maker community. [1] (In reality, they were trying to but couldn't figure out how because they used their PCB house's free proprietary software which couldn't export - we're talking a tiny hobby operation here.)
Then he went against the very principles he publicly shamed others for failing to follow and turned MakerBot's hardware and software proprietary in order to make more money.[2][3] All the people who politely but firmly criticised him for failing to live up to the same standards he held were accused of using "language similar to that we usually hear from people who blow things up" and "fundamentalism" by another maker[4]. This was linked supportively by one of the most prominent companies, Adafruit.[5] Anyone who suggested that comparing other members of the community to terrorists was incredibly inflammatory itself, or linked Bre Pettis' own views on others who took open hardware closed, was labelled a "troll" and had their comments deleted. People who correctly figured out that MakerBot was taking their hardware closed based on Bre's non-denial denial[6] were called liars and accused of spreading rumours. Remember, Bre's own public humiliation of newbies with much less power than him didn't get this kind of criticism.
So yeah. I'm basically done with open hardware and the maker community. It looks like a way of suckering people into doing big businesses' work for them and then labelling them terrorists when they ask said businesses to uphold their end of the bargain. I guess it's profitable for some though.[7]
[1] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2010/03/25/open-source-ethics-a...
[2] http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-sour...
[3] http://openalia.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-definitive-make...
[4] http://www.tigoe.net/blog/category/open-innovation/408/
[5] http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-s...
[6] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/20/fixing-misinformatio...
[7] http://allthingsd.com/20130619/makerbot-sells-to-stratasys-f...
Also, just because someone starts on this app, doesn't mean they won't move on to something else later.
No, it doesn't necessarily mean they won't move on to something else later, but they're now living in a universe where it will always be Autodesk's job to make that harder or less obvious to them. By any means available.
If it wasn't Autodesk doing this, would you have the same reaction? What about Makerbot's move away from open-source?
There is no such thing as a 1K resistor as in 1000.000 ohms. At least not unless you pay an insane amount of money. What there is, is a random-ish spectrum of values where sorted into EIA "preferred value" bins, 10% tolerance resistors that are too high to fit in the EIA E12 bin of 820 ohms, but too low to fit in the EIA E12 bin of 1200 ohms, are by definition dropped into the EIA E12 bin for "1K" resistors.
So a lot of (good) modeling work is screwing around with placing the "wrong" value resistors, simulating, and seeing what happens. So you've got a budget constraint such that you'd like to use cheap 10% resistors. An a theoretical equation said 1063.237 ohms is just right. So you'd superficially think simulating a 1K resistor is good enough, but you really need to simulate what happens when you insert a perfect 820 or a perfect 1200... Will it explode and kill people, or merely clip and distort into a guaranteed product return and/or unhappy customer? In which case its time to start fighting with the boss to spend some extra nickles (times millions of units) to install 5% or 1% resistors. Or maybe it doesn't matter and you get to save some dough.
What makes it even more exciting is quite a few performance characteristics depend on multiple devices. You're not building a little small signal RF amp with one real world random resistor in the bias ckt and every other component is theoretically perfect. No, both your base bias resistors and collector resistor and transistor beta and everything else is "fuzzy".
There exist semi-automated tools to fuzz-n-sim for the pros... this will only confuse the heck out of the noobs so its not often discussed.
Imagine if when you wrote code, you didn't really write "if-then" and "do-while" and "for-loop" but really wrote things that are within 10% of a "do-while" almost all the time, but its never really perfect. And that's what EE work is like. Fun, eh?